In June 2011, Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates was featured in a podcast hosted by Chris Martenson. The show updated listeners as to some of the latest events surrounding Reactor 4 and groundwater monitoring concerns, I will only highlight a few of the details, the entire podcast can be found here.

Chris Martenson: What can they really do beyond just keep trying to dump water in there and keep their fingers crossed?

Arnie Gundersen: If you put too much water in these reactors they get heavy, and they are not designed to sway when there is heavy  tens of tons of extra water in them. So they are really not designed to sway. So lets say there is a severe aftershock, Unit 3 and Unit 4 are in real jeopardy.

Chris Martenson: Is there some way that they [TEPCO] can maybe just throw up their hands and just pour a bunch of concrete on it and call it a day?

Arnie Gundersen: I think eventually they may get to the point of throwing up their hands and pouring the concrete on.

They cant do that yet, because the cores are still too hot. So we are going to see the dance were in for another year or so, until the cores cool down.

At that point, theres not anywhere near as much decay heat and you probably could consider filling them with concrete and just letting sit there, like we have it at Chernobyl, as a giant mausoleum.

That would work for units 1, 2, and 3. Unit 4 is still a problem, because again all the fuel is at the top and you cant put the concrete at the top because you will collapse the building and its so radioactive...

The Units 1,2,3 at Fukushima have melted their reactor cores and are contaminating air, ground and water including the Pacific Ocean since their containment(s) have been breached.

While the Unit 4 reactor was empty due to remodeling and maintenance, all it's fuel was temporarily placed in 4's fuel pond which it was not designed to hold both spent fuel and a full reactor load of fuel. Great Quake and its tsunami strikes along with explosions due to nuclear fuels without cooling and you have a damaged and weakened Unit 4 building with an overweight and overloaded fuel pool besides the nearby (3) destroyed Units.

The next step is to unload the Unit 4 fuel pool before a quake brings it down. The plan to unload the pool will take at least a year and a half to prepare for before actually removing any fuel.

This entire site has/had (6) reactors designed by American GE starting with the first Unit construction back in the late 60s. These units are called BWR (boiling water reactors) with about 10(?) various designs still used in the US but the major portion of reactors here in the US are of the PWR type (pressurized water reactor).

All these types of reactors have some type of backup plan for containment but it involves water circulating for cooling. Without backup power for pumps plus a source of water and intact plumbing to deliver the cooling water, a core catcher is worthless as melted fuel at 3000 degrees melts through everything on its way to the China Syndrome.

Not to mention all the radioactive contamination being produced during a meltdown.

What happened at Fukushima is called a ‘blackout’ which means no power to run the plant. The nuclear manual has a blank page after the heading ‘Blackout’ because not only can’t anything thing be done to stop a meltdown in that case but there are no other scenarios to guide you through that kind of disaster. Gotta have power and water.

Nuclear engineers and scientists know a blackout is possible but highly improbable. In this case, (5) nuclear power units and (7) spent fuel pools had a blackout, at the same time. With (3) units losing containment. To most, unthinkable.

"Hopefully American nuclear reactors are safer than this one. I wonder if they all have a core catcher in case of a meltdown."

‘Safer’ would be difficult to achieve since no commercial plant, anywhere, has ever hurt anyone. But design changes to accommodate an earthquake greater magnitude than 8, along with a tsunami will probably be incorporated. These plants were designed fifty years ago. The US is barely in the nuclear business anymore, having sold our industry to Matushita and Toshiba, who in turn, sold rights to manufacture our last designs to the Chinese.

Of course future plants will be even more dangerous to scare mongers and environmental obstructionists whose incomes depend upon scaring an ignorant public. Its getting harder to make a good living scaremongering, and with the 'progressives' in charge, what's left to be afraid of?.

It should be noted that TEPCO was actually exploring future investment, money, which, as everyone knows, is the root of all evil. The solution to that is to continue Obama’s path of nationalization. That way we won't need to worry about nuclear safety, and won't even have to know about it. Safety won't be and issue because all of us will shortly have no worries thanks to Obamacare.

China, of course, will soon be the largest producer of nuclear electric power, as they stay on course to build one hundred twenty five new plants in fifteen years. It will take China a while to see air as clean as France's, where over 90% of French electricity is nuclear generated.

Spaulding: You really have to ask yourself why they stopped nuclear bomb testing and what was the incidents of different types of cancers before and after nuclear bomb testing and how is rising background radiations levels good for the earth and its inhabitants? Why are there no go zones around nuclear dump sites and nuclear power catastrophes.

Building more nuclear reactors and expecting a different results than what is happening at Fukushima is asinine.

Japan has 53 out 54 nuclear reactors shut down at this moment and life goes without nuclear power generation but nuclear fallout from Fukushima continues because it can’t be stopped or contained.

You can also tell everyone what your definition of dying by nuclear power is.

Why would such a ‘backwards’ country like Germany decide to end their nuclear power generation program after the events at Fukushima?

Why don’t they just re-start San Onofre units 2 and 3 right now? What’s the big deal there? What are they afraid of?

Why are liquid sodium cooled nuclear generation plants not popular?

How can you have clean air and rising background radiation levels at the same time?

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